The Church of Scientology's Supremacy over the search term
"Scientology" on Google

FINAL UPDATE? 8 Apr 2002: A Google
search for Scientology now turns up astonishing results--a balanced representation
of what is actually out there on the net, ranked by popularity. It appears that
whatever remaining issues may remain, the substantive central issue--whether
this search engine accurately represents web content--is at least for the moment
resolved. The rest of this page should, therefore, be considered, if not obsolete,
at least partially superseded by events.

23 Mar 2002: Yahoo!
Directory on Scientology Opposing Views noted for linking to this page,
which is odd, considering that they deleted their link to Xenu.net
although they have, so far, escaped scrutiny for doing so. Interestingly, this
only appears to have disappeared for the search term "Scientology"
itself. On a search for "Operation Clambake" it shows up first.

21 Mar 2002: Slashdot
weighs in. Shortly thereafter, so does Heise.de,
a German geek webzine fairly similar to Slashdot. Note: I have been corrected
that Heise.de is, in fact, a publication of the German newsmagazine "Computer
und Technik"

FLASH: This Usenet post
from Andreas Heldal-Lund, webmaster of xenu.net,
indicates that Google has removed links from its search engine based on a DMCA
notification from the cult of Scientology.
If true, this has huge repercussions for the entire Internet--sites will disappear
from the Google search engine based upon a mere allegation that they MIGHT be
infringing--in other words, based upon the mere opinion of a copyright holder.
In light of AOL's
recent smash victory in which it was proven that the DMCA provided it immunity,
Google's decision seems bizarre, and even suicidal. Note that these Scientology
allegations are nothing new. This cult has been shopping their laundry list
of bogus allegations around to anyone who would listen for years. They have
never to date filed an infringement suit, although they have had years to do
so. The obvious reason for this is that Xenu.net
contains no infringing content.

QUICK AND DIRTY LINK LIST: A few links to the developing
story concerning the disappearance of Xenu.net
from Google. Scientology conspiracy? Google revenge? Inadvertent fallout from
overzealous supporters of the site? Only Google knows.

UPDATE: 20 March 2002: For some reason, some time between
02:55 PM EST and 07:25 PM EST yesterday, Xenu.net
entirely disappeared from a Google
search for Scientology. There are a variety of reasons this could have happened.
Xenu.net could simply have been
down at the exact moment Google spidered it. (However, it was up as late as
02:55 PM and was also up at 07:25 PM EST when I noticed its disappearance from
the engine.) While other explanations are more suspicious, there's no reason
yet to assume foul play. It could merely be an ironic quirk of fate that this
has happened right now; but if it isn't, it will certainly be noted widely.

UPDATE: 6 March 2002. This update
is to take note of some major changes in what I was reporting, as well as to
clarify a few things that have resulted in misunderstanding. For the past week
or so, the major situation I had been commenting on has changed. Xenu.net
is at #4 on a Google search for Scientology. Another development is that the
Scientology
directory on the Open Directory
Project is now listed as "This category needs an editor," indicating
that for reasons I can not elaborate on, Scientologist editor andir is no longer
editor of that category, or for that matter others for which she was previously
listed.

These constitute rather major changes in the data reported below,
which may become of only historical interest in the future. The second part
of this update is to correct a few areas where I was vague. One of these was
in seeming to blame the Open Directory
Project for this situation. I should have mentioned several mitigating factors.
One of them is that even when no critical sites were in the first page of results,
due to Google's connection to the ODP, categories containing the search term
were listed immediately above the search results, one of those categories being
the Opposing
Views category on Scientology. Another is that to the extent ODP influenced
the PageRank of critical pages at all, that influence was positive. It was not
my intention to suggest that either ODP, Google, or both, were somehow colluding
with Scientology to give inflated rankings, nor to object to reasonable rankings
like scientology.org being the first search result. Finally, these results apply
only to the use of the single search term "Scientology" by itself.
Even a relatively clueless search engine strategy like typing natural language
questions into Google defeats all this very expensive spam. Try Should
I join Scientology? or Is
Scientology a cult? and you get almost entirely critical pages as results.
(I'm aware Scientology could easily use these ideas in new spam attempts, but
frankly I like the idea of them adding a rant denying being a cult to all their
pages.)

In conclusion, Scientology is of course not the only entity using
these strategies. As this
Slashdot post shows, the porn industry uses tactics similar to Scientology's.
While I suspected this might be the case, this revealed a similarly sophisticated
strategy (as separated from a lot of the blatant spam that bounces off Google's
well-designed search engine).

Google is, of course, the king
of all search engines, so it is with Google
that I am primarily concerned, although the interaction between Google
and the Open Directory Project
is also interesting. The Open Directory
Project is a Yahoo!-like
hierarchically-organized directory which is widely mirrored by a variety of
ISPs. The mirrors themselves are usually highly ranked in Google
search results, so links from ODP
tend to increase ranking.

It should be noted that this situation is worsened by the fact
that the ODP
directory related to Scientology is run by a Scientologist, while the ODP
directory relating to Scientology opponents remains without an editor. ODP
routinely refuses applications for editors of the directory, and some have accused
them of round-filing user submissions, while every new Scientology-owned site
is added immediately and without oversight. When sites critical of Scientology
are added, it is often after a long delay, if the site is added at all. Despite
numerous submissions to the ODP in the last three months, almost none have been
added. This problem is also detailed on this
thread on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.

Google prides
itself on its PageRankô
technology, which while largely proprietary, in the words of its creators "relies
on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure
as an indicator of an individual page's value." Google
continues, stating: "In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to
page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the
sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that
casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more
heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"

Unfortunately, in the case of this particular search term, the
Church of Scientology, a large
corporate entity, has figured out how to exploit this to their advantage by
having large quantities of domains that are packed heavily with links to each
other. Figure 1, generated by the VisIT
software, is a stark illustration of this.

Fig 1. Search term "Scientology" using only Google

As you can see, Scientology-owned pages exclusively and exhaustively
point to other Scientology-owned pages. Some, such as exactscientology.net,
are little more than highly-linked link lists whose sole purpose is to point
to other Scientology-owned pages which themselves link to exactscientology.
Whois information for the vast majority of these indicate identical registrations
such as this one for exactscientology.net.
Therefore, Scientology-associated pages appear to be more highly ranked than
critical pages, which appear to exist as islands, sparsely connected to each
other.

The rankings are not representative of how broadly Scientology
critical pages are linked. These search results checking links to scientology.org
and xenu.net
using the link: operand on Google
indicate that despite comparable numbers of links, the search rankings vary
widely. The links to scientology.org are almost exclusively from other Scientology
owned pages, such as exactscientology.net and thousands of nearly identical
template-generated "spam
pages." In this case, in Google's
language, the "uniquely democratic nature" of page ranking depends
on how much money you have to buy duplicative domain registrations.

To be fair to Google,
this effort by Scientology has been quite costly, involving huge
numbers of domain registrations and the creation of a vast network of incestuously
linked pages. Figure 1A shows this in more detail.

Fig 1A. More detailed view using search term "Scientology"
with search engine Google

Looking at this in even more detail, one sees that outside the
most obvious "core" Scientology sites, a galaxy of smaller domains
also points to scientology.org and its sister sites, while Scientology-critical
sites largely sit by themselves. While they are linked from other sites, those
links do not add up to the sheer bulk of the incestuous network of links which
creates Scientology's illusion of relevance--even though most of those links
are, effectively, the result of Scientology linking to itself. Where critical
pages do link to each other, the links are not effectively reciprocated.

The same general scheme prevails on the Open
Directory Project, although with a slightly different focus, as Figure 2
shows.

Fig 3. Search term "Scientology" using Google and
dmoz.org

Fig 3A. More detailed view using search term "Scientology"
with Google and dmoz.org

Taking a closer look at this, we have the final result: scientology.org
sitting atop a vast pyramid of links to and from it, boosting its ranking on
search engines as well as the rankings of its sister sites, all owned by the
same entity, yet appearing in the "uniquely democratic" ranking system
as if they have been elected number one by universal acclaim, although the vast
majority of this ranking is generated by what amounts to linking to itself.

While the Church of Scientology is merely one of thousands of
entities attempting to manipulate its rankings in Google and other search engines,
unlike the others, Scientology has managed effectively to subvert the PageRankô
technology and elect itself supreme.

It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable for scientology.org to be
the first hit on a search
for "Scientology", but for it and sister sites to be the bulk
of the search results is getting ridiculous. As a closing note, I should note
that this analysis focuses almost exclusively on the "voting" aspect
of the PageRankô
technology and that other factors play a highly important role in page ranking,
including relevance of content and how often and prominently the search term
is mentioned on the page.